Keith Garebian's 1999 publication The Making of Cabaret ran to 156 pages; this well-justified second edition, at 232 pages, is half as long again. Since the original appeared musical theatre research has followed the shift in performance studies towards deconstruction and contextualization, and now offers more sophisticated analysis than was evident in much twentieth-century writing in the field. Garebian acknowledges ‘the scholarly work . . . by Knapp, Wolf, Morris and others’, and new material which encouraged him to remove biographical matter and ‘concentrate more sharply on aesthetic and socio-cultural issues that did not receive much discussion in the first edition’ (p. xiv).
Cabaret's complicated evolution from Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin, via Van Druten's stage play I am a Camera, to Hal Prince's 1966 stage show and Bob Fosse's 1972 film, provides the diachronic axis in an examination of narrative development and artistic production. In interpreting Isherwood's original text Garebian shows how the characters evolved from their originals, literary and real-life. Cabaret's cultural contexts are explored: first, sexual licence and cultural decadence in the late Weimar Republic, then the pre-war world of rising Nazism and Jewish persecution. Perhaps less obviously, the USA in the 1960s, the civil rights movement and the debilitating effect of the Vietnam War are judged as significant background to the show's formation: the world experienced by its first audiences. Its later production history, with its revisions and adjustments to character, setting and context, affords opportunity to reflect on the reception ambiguities and possibilities of succeeding productions.
Garebian tells how Prince, a practitioner well versed in European theatrical traditions from Meyerhold to Piscator to Joan Littlewood, embraced expressionism after ‘an apocalyptic experience’ (p. 38) at the Taganka Theatre, Moscow. This inspired rejection of traditional formulas, star vehicles and realistic conventions to create in Cabaret a concept musical: ‘the time was ripe for assimilating every aspect of a work within an overall vision’ that would be ‘sensitive to the social, political, and cultural unrest of his time’ and presage ‘the kind of artistry that might revolutionize American musical theatre’ (p. 23).
Examining shifting identity and sexual orientation in the principal characters, the book finds a central key to the show's power in its multifunctional cabaret frame. Prince's debt to Brecht is massive: dramatic structuring and the reception of Brecht's work are shown as aspects of historical context. The cabaret, like Brecht's boxing ring, offers a forum for presentation and debate. At once a setting for the narrative and an escape from it, it offers a space for comment on the harsh changes taking place outside. It is a ‘limbo world presided over by the sinister Emcee’, whose songs link the characters’ ‘unconventional sexuality, money problems and political cowardice to Berlin's general moral collapse’ (p. 106).
Similar insights illuminate the production values of Fosse's film: ‘Cabaret turned the conventions of big-musical movies inside out’ (p. 151). The commentary on the adaptation is as perceptive as the analysis of the Berlin cabaret world is absorbing; the diverse influences on Cabaret's creators and the significance of their contributions constitute a handbook of trends in twentieth-century theatre. Entertaining and knowledgeable, it adds usefully to our understanding of creative processes – and it's a thoroughly good read.
